Resource Sharing-Best Practices:
This page provides strategies to help ensure that you are legally using copyrighted material. Remember that the best way to avoid copyright violation over course materials is to have students access legal copies of material on their own by purchasing it, retrieving it through the library, or accessing material that is either in the public domain or created with open access permissions.
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Teach Students to Use the Library
- Only provide students with the citations they need to resources available through the library so that they can search for the material themselves. Teaching students to gather their own material is better for them and the library.
- Provide source requirements that encourage students to practice the research skills that they will need throughout their educational experience, careers, and personal lives.
- Encourage students to use academic library resources over Google or other sources that may provide illegal access to copyrighted material or misinformation
You can help students learn more about the library by sharing the following resources in your course:
To schedule a classroom session with a librarian, see the Ask a Librarian page.
Link to Library Resources:
When you do post library resources, use links to legally obtained copies of materials rather than emailing copies or uploading scanned or downloaded pdf copies to your course management system (CMS) or syllabus. The reasons for using this method are as follows:
- Linking helps you avoid inadvertent copyright violation, since you are pointing to the document on the original server, in its original context. Those who attempt to access the item using that link must authenticate themselves as authorized users of the material. See the Copyright Information page to learn more.
- Linking keeps the library in compliance with library subscription terms. The copying and posting of full-text is prohibited for some library online resources, but linking to them from a course management system is allowed.
- The library will know how many times the linked item has actually been accessed. Accurate usage statistics allow library staff to make informed collection management decisions. If one person downloads an item and passes it around, it looks like the article received a single use. If the link is shared instead, the number of actual uses is recorded each time the item is accessed.
- The author of the item will know how many times it has been accessed. This use data, often referred to as “altmetrics,” is one measure of an article’s reach or impact and can be a factor in promotion, tenure, and grant applications.
Learn how to link to various library online materials, see How to Link to Library Resources.
Open Access Material
Open Access resources are peer-reviewed, academic resources that are distributed for free online (Wikipedia). Unlike traditional publication schemes in which subscribers pay for content, the authors of open access material usually pay publication fees to cover the costs of publishing and hosting. Some open access material is published by established publication houses; some are less well-known. Naturally, open access resources should be carefully vetted to ensure that the material is of high-quality.
The UMass Global Library provides curated selection of open access databases related to the UMass Global curriculum. Currently there are about three dozen databases on the list. They can be found by searching the library's Databases List and limiting the Types drop-down menu to Open Access, or by scrolling through the entire list and looking for the open lock icon: 
Librarians add material to the Databases List when appropriate, but some well-known, established open access databases include:
For more about Open Access, see the library's guide to Information Privilege.
